Redirect loops and mazes

[solderpunk]

> Is this behaviour really desirable?
> 
> I vote for no.  The text/gemini files already support links to
> non-gemini URLs.  Allowing server-directed redirects to non-gemini URLs
> would simply mean that I could no longer be sure that a gemini:// URL
> would access a gemini resource.  Meaning that I could no longer be sure
> that the transaction is encrypted.  And that's just with gopher - the
> server could make all sorts of surprising things happen on my computer
> if the client happens to support other protocols.

Hmm, good question!

I share the intuition that cross-protocol redirects violate the
principle of least surpise, and also make URLs non-transparent.  I mean,
redirects do that to some extent anyway, which is why some clients (like
Bombadillo) request explicit confirmation before following any (I may
add this as a user-specifiable option to AV-98), but cross-protocol
redirects are arguably as bad as it gets.

I think I'd be happy to explicitly forbid these in the spec, unless
somebody can think of a compelling legitimate use case?

-Solderpunk